AIM Research introduces new initiative

02-Feb-2012 - Could consultants be the missing link in turning insight into outcomes, asks Mick James, Top-Consultant.com’s management consultancy columnist.

AIM Research introduces new initiative

I’m not sure if the consultancy community at large is aware of this, but the UK is one of the top centres of management research in the world, ranking second only to the USA in terms of rankings and citations. Yet it would also be true to say that much of this research fails to affect the day to day lives of our managers. Could consultants be the missing link in turning insight into outcomes?

Much of the rude health of the UK’s research faculty comes form the efforts of the Advanced Institute of Management (AIM) Research initiative, which was set up nine years ago to improve the standing and capability of UK management research.

Much of this was done by direct funding—regular readers of this column will have come across one of the projects—Dr Joe O’Mahoney’s work on innovation in consultancy.

By directing funding directly to individual researchers, AIM Research helped correct a situation where management research often failed to attract funding, largely due to a lack of consensus on approaches and “what good looked like”.

Now, with the UK spending between £60 and £70 millon a year in business schools, the AIM Research initiative is drawing to a close, but a new initiative, AIM Practice, will take its work to a new level.

As AIM Research deputy director Dr Andy Neely explains: “If you look at that research spend as a giant R&D lab, it’s generated an enormous amount of knowledge, which gets written up in journals and discussed in conferences but hardly ever discussed by managers. We want to find ways to take the valuable outputs from the academic world and turn them into something that as a manager you can pick up and use in your organisation.”

The approach AM practice is taking is to use research projects as the basis for creating products that consultants can use with their clients. For example, a research project called “The House of Lean,” which looked at the adoption of lean thinking, has become the basis of a diagnostic tool to help find out how well lean thinking is embedded in individual organisations.

The results will act both as a starting point for the conversation with the client, and the diagnostic can also be reapplied at the end of the intervention to validate the changes.

“From a consultancy point of view it’s more likely to appeal to the small to quite large firms,” says Neely. “Many of them haven’t got the in-house research terms to do this but will want to work with 120 business schools—it adds to their brand to say that the results come from a two-year research project.”

The data sets behind the research are quite large—one project draws on a survey of 1,000 retail organisations, and Neely estimates that at least a third of the FTSE 100 have been involved in one AIM Research project or another. With the advent of AIM Practice, these data sets will of course be constantly refreshed, and inform future research.

At the moment AIM Practice as developed over 15 toolkits, covering areas such as HR management, strategy and innovation, which are available for download on a per-user licensed basis from its website. In the future, Neely hopes that the project will become self-funding, allowing more existing research to be turned into toolkits, and also operating on a publishing model for future projects.

“With 15 products live on the website, we are now testing the market to see how much appetite there is for the product—we don’t want to replicate stuff that is already out there,” he says. “But if people come to us with suggestions or queries we can contact the wider AIM network and ask if anybody has got anything. I would be surprised if there was a topic where nobody had done anything.”

With a mass of raw material already sitting on academics’ laptops waiting to be accessed, and the possibility of a much richer and more practical interchange between the worlds of academia and consulting, AIM Practice could become a major force. I shall follow this one with interest.

All views expressed in this article are those of Mick James and do not necessarily reflect the views of Top-Consultant.com and Consultant-News.com.

Contact Mick with your views or suggestions at: mick.james@top-consultant.com.